


A Basket Full of Feelings

by Alasse_Irena



Category: Dance Academy
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:03:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasse_Irena/pseuds/Alasse_Irena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abigail Armstrong doesn't want to fall in love, no matter how superficially or trivially she does it. All she cares about is dance. But it seems as though she can't have one without the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Basket Full of Feelings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escritoireazul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/gifts).



> Thank you for your prompt! Hope I've satisfied it at least a little bit. Happy Yuletide!

Abigail once heard of a man whose mode of earning money looked something like this: on a lonely street at night, he would struggle home, carrying a couple of bags and a large pane of glass. When he saw someone, he would stop them, and ask politely if they would hold the pane of glass while he rearranged his bags. He would smile an awkward smile and laugh, self-deprecatingly - Look at us, look what a silly situation I’m in, how embarrassing -  and the stranger would take the glass. 

Straight away, the man would start rifling through bags, grab anything of value, and run, while the stranger looked around desperately for somewhere safe to put the glass down. The weird thing was, no one would ever drop the glass, until it was too late. They were still bound by that feeling of helping someone, by the connection that the put-on awkward smile and friendly laugh had made, for just a second too long. 

This seems like a accurate summation of the experience of having a crush to Abigail. Metaphorically, someone hands you a whole basket full of unwanted feelings, which you can’t seem to bring yourself to put down while they make a mess of the important parts of your life. They’re inevitably the worst people to care about. The natural talent who wouldn’t recognise work ethic if it fell on them from on high. The neurotically obsessive ones, who don’t want to look at Abigail any more than she wants to look at them. The ones who dance in spite of physical flaws that mean they’ll probably never make it. She hates that crush the most. It’s like looking in a mirror.

 

If she’s honest with herself, Katrina Karamakov was the first. She remembers the first time she heard the name, the first time Kat walked into one of her classes.

“Who’s that?”

“Katrina Karamakov.”

Abigail already knew the name Karamakov. She had a poster of Sebastian Karamakov on her bedroom wall, from before he retired from dancing to choreograph. One day, he’ll make a dance especially for you, her mother told her sometimes. One day, when you’re famous. Abigail rolled her eyes, because she was plenty old enough for the phrase make a dance sound childish, but in her head she could still see a grown up version of herself (her mother, only slimmer) in tutu and pointe shoes, and Sebastian Karamakov smiling proudly as his vision was realised.

She still remembers the moment she realised that her childish dream of dancing on every famous stage in Europe (What are you going to be when you grow up, Abi? A ballerina. I’m going to be a ballerina) had been rearranged without her consent to have Kat in it. Stop it, she told her subconscious, fiercely. There’s no point anyway. No one choreographs a pas de deux for two women. The other half of herself argued that Kat’s father was a well-known choreographer - he could make them a ballet.

Even then, she prided herself on realism, but Kat seemed to have weaseled her way in between Abigail’s thoughts, twisted them into fantasies rather than ambitions. The worst of it was that Kat never did a scrap of work or practice, and yet her developpes were always the highest, the arches of her feet the strongest.

Abigail was thirteen when she stopped going round to Kat’s house to have ice-cream after class. She stopped eating ice-cream altogether. She chose her friends more carefully after that.

 

The same way Kat did, Sammy almost snuck up on her. “He’s the worst dancer in the school,” she wailed into the phone after her first pas de deux class. “He has to do pointe with us because his ankles are so weak. I don’t even think he can lift me!” She adds a lift and lightness to her voice like she might be joking, but it’s carefully calculated. Wouldn’t that be humiliating? Imagine if she were made to change partners to someone stronger. It would never happen to bloody Tara Webster. She doesn’t say any of this to her mother .Her mother has been working for Abigail’s entire life to get her into the National Academy of Dance, and she imagines it’s all in the bag from here.. She doesn’t need to know how many ways there are still to fail.

For months she hated Sammy, because it was the only antidote to accidentally caring about him. She complained at every turn that she was disappointed in the school, and the low standard of entrant they selected. She made official complaints that her partner was letting her down. Miss Raine looked at her with an expression that read I expected better more clearly than words could have done, and Abigail knew it was true: partnering took two people, and she wasn’t pulling her weight.

She had never put as much effort into something other than dancing until Sammy was assigned to tutor her in English. She couldn’t let him - Samuel Lieberman, the boy en pointe - outdo her in anything. That’s what she told herself, because she’d learnt with Kat that screaming stop stop stop inside her head was an ineffective tactic.

When he kissed her, she had to admit something. It was every cliche she had ever heard about first kisses. Her heart leapt; shivery tingles ran up her skin from her calloused toes to her hairsprayed scalp; her mind was occupied by thought about how soft and warm his lips were, how his eyes looked behind his glasses. Dancing took a back seat. That was the worst part.

She had never been so terrified in her life.

 

And now there’s this. She watches him dance with eyes wide open and asks herself stupid questions about what he has that she doesn’t. Oliver Lloyd. His movements are technically perfect, no sickled foot, no turned in leg, no lifted shoulders. There’s none of the soft, intangible feeling stuff that Tara Webster is endlessly praised for (sometimes Abigail wonders if there isn’t something wrong with her, that she can’t understand this other side to to dancing that everyone has promised her all her life exists). He is solid and strong and correct:everything the company doesn’t want at the moment, and Abigail can only see the spiralling doom in him that she’s know she is also coming to - the years of work wasted. She’s never regretted not having a childhood, but she will regret it when the Company tells her she’s a capable dancer, but not what they’re looking for at the moment. She hears the words in her head all the time.

Looking at Ollie is like looking in a mirror.

“What are you looking at?”

Abigail swallows down everything she’s feeling and looks at Sammy by her side.They haven’t spoken in months, not properly. “You don’t have bad taste,” she says at last, “I guess.”

Sammy smiles at her, and it’s that same awkward puppy smile that made her heart turn over last year, that draws a thread tight between them. She can’t let go. “Nor do you,” he says.

 


End file.
